First, what is a homelab? While I don’t think there’s a dictionary definition, a homelab seems to refer loosely to the collection of servers, networking gear, and supporting infrastructure that someone has set up in their home, for experimentation and learning, either for fun or to develop skills.
Naturally, homelabs can take a wide variety of sizes and shapes. Take a quick look around /r/homelab on Reddit, and you’ll find setups ranging from a single old Android phone to a full-fledged data center. Whatever the scale, the ethos of the subreddit (and other Homelab communities I’ve seen outside of Reddit) seems to be centered around learning, experimentation and playing around. People often have big, expensive and crazy setups just for the heck of it.
At my home, I have a setup that looks like a homelab. It consists of a small rack housing a few computers, a switch, and a few other supporting pieces of hardware. But I don’t consider this a homelab, because I don’t use it as a lab. It sits there, running the ten or so services I self-host for me and my family. When I work on it, it is for regular maintainence, incremental improvement, or to install new services. I do enjoy working on it, and I’ve learned a lot along the way, but these are merely side effects.
So I hesitate to call it a homelab, and there’s this small lexical vacuum here—no other word applies well. ‘Home server’ comes close, but it feels strange to refer to the whole setup, consisting of multiple servers and other non-server equipment, in the singular as a ‘home server’. ‘Home servers’ isn’t ideal either. I usually just refer it to as my ‘self-hosting setup’. Yeah, I know I’m splitting hairs—it isn’t that big of a deal what you call things. But I think it is interesting that within the set of people who keep servers in their home, there are two subsets (with considerable overlap) whose reasons for doing so are sort of orthogonal. The ‘homelab’ moniker perfectly fits one group, and it would be nice for the self-hosters whose setups are not homelabs to have a cool name too. ‘HomeCloud’? ‘HomeProd’? Stick to ‘home server(s)’? I don’t have any good ideas.